Opportunity
Ecotricity was founded in 1995 as the world’s first green energy company. They are also the greenest energy company in Britain, supplying 100% green electricity and frack-free gas to over 200,000 customers. Ecotricity operates a unique model. They use their customers’ energy bills to fund the building of new sources of Green Energy. They like to refer to this as turning ‘Bills into Mills’ – energy bills into windmills.
In the beginning, Ecotricity relied on spreadsheets for forecasting and scheduling. A lot of time was spent analyzing and fixing problems and they could not track the actual performance of their contact center. They realized the spreadsheets had reached their limits and they needed to find a solution that would help them better serve their customers and automate forecasting and scheduling.
Solution
Part of Ecotricity’s requirements to select a Workforce Management software was that it had to meet their current needs but also future needs. Ecotricity knew that the usual spreadsheets weren’t meeting their needs, so when looking into vendors for Workforce Management they were looking for something that would incorporate superior technologies and services to exceed their expectations.
They were therefore looking for a cloud-based solution that could easily integrate with different systems, especially Salesforce which they had recently implemented. Ecotricity was looking for a system that would allow them to track performance as well as provide actionable insights for significant improvements. Further, a simplifed framework that would put together these services in an easy to use method was important for a faster and smoother integration.
Verint Monet stood out due to its tight and unique integration with Salesforce and its flexibility in the cloud. Verint Monet would allow them to truly understand handle time and volume in Salesforce. The ease of use of the solution also made the difference as not everyone in their team had experience with Workforce Management software. Finally, Ecotricity was able to use the data collected to see where problems lied in their contact center and make the appropriate changes, providing training or other tools needed to optimize their workforce.
Benefits
After Ecotricity selected Verint Monet as their Workforce Management vendor of choice, they saw benefits in the following areas:
- Administrative time to develop schedules before Verint Monet took 2-3 hours per week and after Verint Monet only 1 hour.
- In 2018, there were 1,500 holiday requests that needed to be approved manually by checking the spreadsheet. With Verint Monet, 85% of the holiday requests submitted are automatically approved.
- Administrative time is now better spent doing proactive work.
- Adherence has increased by 10% since the implementation i.e. 20 minutes per person per day.
- Reduction in wrap-up time i.e. the time spent by an agent doing After Call Work went from 3 ½ minutes to 2 ½ minutes.
- Better management of call volume peaks.
- Reduction in agent idle time i.e. reduction of 2 FTEs worth of time because of more effective scheduling and management of peaks.
- Clearer understanding of individual performance from an analysis of various fields in employees interactions.
- Better comprehension of individual progression within each of these areas.
- Faster access to learning and coaching tailored to employee needs.
- Integration of a process for managing performance across multiple areas of the business.
- Higher knowledge on which areas directly affect the customer experience.
- Incorporation of the use of gamification to help stimulate and motivate staff.
- Use of a system that allows more flexibility for work such as hours, shift swaps and support for a work-at-home model.
- The ability to track, manage, and enhance employee performance.
- Use a continuous loop, data-driven process, to set and communicate goals across the organization.
- Regularly measure performance against data to make corrections as needed based on actionable insights.